Friday, July 14, 2017

PARIS - President Donald Trump acknowledged that France and the US had “occasional disagreements” but said that would not disrupt a friendship that dates back to the American Revolution. Macron acknowledged sharp differences with Trump over climate change. But he said he and the US president were able to discuss how best to combat “a global threat with enemies who are trying to destabilise us”, with a focus on counter-terrorism. President Trump said that his recent meeting with Putin had led to a ceasefire in a part of southern Syria, and said that he was working on “a second ceasefire in a very rough part of Syria”. He suggested that other parties would become involved in the deal, saying “and all of a sudden you will have no bullets fired in Syria”. As Trump began his 24-hour tour of Paris, the two leaders’ body language was under close scrutiny. Macron chose to move on from the aggressive handshake he offered the US leader at their initial meeting in May, instead styling himself as Trump’s new “straight-talking” best friend on the international stage. the invitation to the US president to attend this year’s Bastille Day celebrations was in the pipeline long before both Macron and Trump’s election because 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the entry by the US into the first world war.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Liviu Dragnea "swore", in December 2016, on the electoral program, which then became the governing program and the "Bible of the PSD": he guaranteed, in a TV Show, that he would abide by it or else he would resign. Liviu Dragnea did not abide by the electoral program.

Liviu Dragnea did not resign, instead he changed the government....Along with the government, he also replaced the "Bible of the PSD". The new proposals of the PSD, published on the night prior to the investiture, have overturned the business environment. All the companies in Romania will pay, starting with January 1st, 2018, a turnover tax instead of the profit tax, which will disappear, according to the new governing program of the PSD-ALDE coalition. Also, according to the new proposal, the minimum wage level in Romania in the coming years would be 2,000 lei in 2018, 2,200 lei in 2019 and 2,400 lei in 2020, and for those with higher education it would be 2,300 lei in 2018, 2,640 lei in 2019 and 3,000 lei in 2020. According to the governing program, the solidarity contribution will be introduced starting with January 1st, 2018, as well as an additional tax on consumer products whose consumption has a major negative impact on the health of the population. Analysts said that the government is blowing up the economy, businesspeople were shocked. The new ministers swore on the Bible to offer all their power for the material and spiritual progress of the Romanian people. So help them God!

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Britain’s ambition to sign a quick Free Trade Agreement with the European Union after Brexit has received a significant boost after a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice handed expanded trade negotiation powers to Brussels.

The much-anticipated decision from the court in Luxembourg surprised experts by ruling that on key areas - including financial services and transport - the European Union does not need to seek ratification of a trade deal by the EU’s 38 national and local parliaments. Trade experts said the ECJ ruling could substantially reduce the risk of any future EU-UK free trade agreement getting bogged down in the EU national parliaments, opening the way for an FTA to be agreed by a qualified majority vote of EU member states.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

The Fed’s chair, Janet Yellen, said a wide range of indicators showed the US economy was in rude health, allowing its interest rate setting committee to push rates back towards historically normal levels. Policymakers voted nine to one to raise rates.Speaking after the decision, Yellen said she had met Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, “a couple of times” but had only been “introduced” to the president himself. “I fully expect to have a strong relationship with secretary Mnuchin,” she said. “We had good discussions about the economy, about regulatory objectives, the work of the FSOC [Financial Stability Oversight Council] global economic developments, and I look forward to continuing to work with him.” She said she had had a very brief meeting with Trump “and appreciated that as well”.

Earlier in the day the Department of Commerce said retail sales had inched up by 0.1% in February, and that they had been better than it had previously estimated in January.

Monday, March 13, 2017

BERLIN — Police ordered a shopping mall in the western German city of Essen not to open Saturday after receiving credible tips of an imminent attack. The shopping center and the adjacent parking lot stayed closed as about a hundred police officers positioned themselves around the compound to make sure nobody could enter the mall. Several officers scoured the inside of the building to bring out early morning cleaning staff. “As police, we are the security authority here and have decided to close the mall,” police spokesman Christoph Wickhorst said, adding that they had been tipped off late Friday by other security agencies. He did not want to provide further details because of the ongoing investigation.

The downtown mall at Limbecker Platz square will be closed for the entire day. The mall is one of the biggest in Germany with more than 200 stores, according to the shopping center’s website. In 2016, three people were injured in an attack on a Sikh temple in Essen by radicalized German-born Muslim teenagers.

Germany has been on the edge following a series of attacks in public places over the past year.

Monday, March 6, 2017

Western political and media elites reacted with horror to President Trump’s repeated statements that NATO is “obsolete” during the 2016 electoral campaign. They have also reacted with skepticism to more recent efforts by senior administration officials to affirm the U.S. commitment to NATO while pressing America’s allies to do more for their own defense. The critics forget both NATO’s history and — more fundamentally — confuse means with ends in U.S. national security. NATO is an instrument and, accordingly, something the United States can and should examine and seek to fix when it is not working properly. Mr. Trump has correctly understood that NATO isn’t doing its job. Post-Cold War history demonstrates NATO’s failure to adapt to changing circumstances and requirements. George W. Bush administration officials appropriately questioned the alliance’s contribution to U.S. operations in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks and NATO’s first-ever invocation of its mutual defense obligations under Article Five of the Washington Treaty. Later, NATO’s 2011 airstrikes against Libya illustrated considerable shortcomings as key allies proved unable to sustain the campaign for lack of precision bombs against a foe barely able to fight back.In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, NATO members all too readily opted to respond primarily through coordinated U.S.-European Union economic sanctions that predictably failed to deter subsequent Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine. Former President Obama bears no small responsibility for this, having declared in April 2014 that Russia could not be “deterred from further escalation by military force” at a time when decisive deployments of U.S. and NATO military forces in NATO member states surrounding Ukraine might well have affected Mr. Putin’s calculations. But Mr. Obama was far from alone among NATO leaders in his reluctance do this. NATO today has three major problems. First, the alliance has spent far more time discussing its membership than its purpose, leaving its goals unclear. If NATO is a defensive alliance, why did it intervene in Yugoslavia’s civil wars of the 1990s and launch airstrikes in Libya? Neither threatened NATO members with attack. If NATO seeks to stabilize Europe and Eurasia, how did NATO officials expect to do that without a security architecture that incorporated Russia on mutually acceptable terms? Conversely, if NATO sees Moscow as an existential danger and aims to contain and deter Russia, why do so few alliance members meet minimal standards for defense spending and military readiness?

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Relatives of the 12 people killed in December when a truck ploughed into a Christmas market in Berlin have expressed their dismay at the negligent way they say they have been treated by German authorities. About 50 people who lost loved ones in the Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack reportedly told a private meeting called by Germany’s outgoing president, Joachim Gauck, and the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, they felt abandoned at a deeply upsetting time. Relatives said the first official communication they had with authorities was a bill sent to them by the coroner’s office. The letter reportedly included a warning that if the bill was not paid within a certain timeframe, the recipients would face legal action. One relative told Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt newspapers that when she received the letter she had thought at the very least it would be a letter of condolence from Berlin’s mayor. Those who were certain that their family members were among the dead said they were prevented by security personnel from entering the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church on Breitscheidplatz for a religious service held the day after the attack on 19 December. The reason they were given was that high-ranking German politicians – including Gauck – were among the guests. According to the papers, which reported on the four-hour meeting at Gauck’s Bellevue Palace, the president told the relatives he was distressed to hear they had been unable to enter the church and that he had not known about it at the time.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Raiffeisen Bank has snuck a gloomy prediction for the Romanian economy in the prospectus of the MedLife IPO, which it intermediates. "Most analysts claim that Romania needs a new stand-by agreement with the IMF", the MedLife prospectus , published yesterday in order to inform the investors interested in the Romanian stock market and in the MedLife shares in particular. The announcement is mind-boggling, especially as politicians and government members assure us that we are going to have economic growth, higher wages and lower taxes. Furthermore, prime-minister Dacian Cioloş has publicly announced that he would challenge all populist laws with the Constitutional Court. "Raiffeisen Bank" has dropped the aforementioned "bomb" in the Medlife IPO, five days ahead of the parliamentary elections. Except it hasn't taken responsibility for it directly, instead alleging this idea is the result of consensus from "most analysts", without naming them. It is not out of the question that "Raiffeisen Bank" just wanted to make noise and draw attention from investors, as the Romanian stock market has failed to become attractive, despite the projects for expansion conducted by the Bucharest Stock Exchange (the Project to remove the barriers to the entry on the stock market) and by the Financial Oversight Authority (the STEAM project, which has as its goal the move up to the emerging market status) and having brought in Pole Ludwik Sobolewski as CEO. Despite all these efforts, the BSE daily turnover only occasionally passes 7 million Euros a day. "Raiffeisen Bank" has stood out lately, precisely by the fact that it has threatened the Romanian government with a lawsuit in the International Court of Arbitrage, as well as following the ruling of the Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM), which accused the bank of trying to intervene in the ruling rendering process in relation to the laws concerning the banking sector. The bank later changed its tune and sponsored an event of the Romanian government, which was attended by German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Mehmet Simsek, the deputy prime minister, tried to dispel fears on Thursday that the country would return to the deep repression seen the last time it was under similar measures. "The state of emergency in Turkey won't include restrictions on movement, gatherings and free press, etc. It isn't martial law of 1990s," he said. "I'm confident Turkey will come out of this with much stronger democracy, better functioning market economy and enhanced investment climate." But as he made his statement, the crackdown spread to journalists and human rights lawyers. Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a leading newspaper columnist and lawyer, was arrested at the airport as he tried to leave the country. Police also raided the printing house of well-known satirical magazine Le Man...On Thursday, Austria became the first country to take diplomatic action over the crackdown, saying it would summon Turkey's ambassador to discuss Ankara's "increasingly authoritarian" behaviour and allegations it had been behind recent Turkish protests in Vienna. Meanwhile, the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee said it was to launch an inquiry into Britain’s relations with Turkey and the impact of the crackdown on democracy and human rights.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

CARACAS, April 26 (Reuters) - Venezuela's socialist government ordered public workers on Tuesday to work a two-day week as an energy-saving measure in the crisis-hit South American OPEC country. President Nicolas Maduro had already given most of Venezuela's 2.8 million state employees Fridays off during April and May to cut down on electricity consumption. "From tomorrow, for at least two weeks, we are going to have Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays as non-working days for the public sector," Maduro said on his weekly television program. Drought has reduced water levels at Venezuela's main dam and hydroelectric plant in Guri to near-critical levels. The dam provides for about two-thirds of the nation's energy needs. Water shortages and electricity cuts have added to the hardships of Venezuela's 30 million people, already enduring a brutal recession, shortages of basics from milk to medicines, soaring prices, and long lines at shops. Maduro has also changed the clocks so there is half an hour more daylight in the evening, urged women to reduce use of appliances like hairdryers, and ordered malls to provide their own generators. Regarding the public sector measure, the government is excluding workers in sensitive sectors such as food. Full salaries will still be paid despite the two-day week. Critics have derided Maduro for giving state employees days off, arguing it would hurt national productivity and was unlikely to save electricity because people would simply go home and turn on appliances there instead. "Maduro says that 'we in government don't stop working for a second'. Of course. Except for Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays!" satirized Leonardo Padron, a columnist for pro-opposition El Nacional newspaper, via Twitter. Officials said the El Nino weather phenomenon is responsible for Venezuela's electricity woes. But critics accuse the government of inadequate investment, corruption, inefficiency and failure to diversify energy sources.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Officials in the EU have urged Turkey to let in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees trapped on its border at Kilis after fleeing fighting. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said there was a moral, if not legal, duty to provide protection. Turkey says the refugees are receiving food and shelter inside Syria and there is no need to allow them to cross. About 35,000 Syrians have fled a Syrian government offensive on rebel-held positions near Aleppo. Ms Mogherini said the EU was providing funding to Turkey to make sure it had the "means, the instruments, the resources to protect and to host people that are seeking asylum". In November, the EU clinched a deal with Turkey, offering it €3bn (£2.3bn; $3.3bn) to care for Syrian refugees on Turkish soil. Ms Mogherini's call was echoed by EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, whose country currently holds the EU presidency. "I look at these images of people standing at the Turkish border and I just wanted to underline the message people who are in humanitarian need should be allowed in," said Mr Koenders. However Kilis governor Suleyman Tapsiz said the move was not necessary. "Our doors are not closed but at the moment there is no need to host such people inside our borders," he said. Turkey already hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees - 2.5 million. In the past few days, the Syrian army - backed by Russian air strikes - has made a series of gains around Aleppo, Syria's largest city. On Thursday, 60 donor countries meeting in London pledged billions of dollars to ease the plight of Syrian refugees. About 4.6 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Another 13.5 million are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance inside the country.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

What is happening now is extremely dangerous because it could easily lead to a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, only on steroids. If you look up a graph of global oil demand, you will note that, except during brief recessions, oil demand always goes up. That is because new oil consuming machines, which perform more work than humans alone could ever hope to do, are constantly being built. Last year China alone built 22,000,000 new vehicles. The world population is increasing, and globalization has displaced manufacturing far away from where products are finally consumed. So more oil is continually needed. Ask yourself what has to happen if all the oil the system needed wasn't available. It follows that since there is no substitute for petroleum in transportation that can replace the energy now obtained from oil in any reasonable period of time, the economy would be forced to shrink. Wishing won't deliver goods from China to the US, or move people to work, or fly tourists from the EU to the Olympics in Brazil. The price of oil could go to $300 a barrel, and the amount of oil produced could only be expanded so fast. It takes time to find oil and drill wells. Any shortage caused by lack of investment in oil exploration today, will take time to remedy. Therein lies a potentially dangerous condition - the time delay getting new oil to a refinery. With the record level of debt just about everywhere, and with interest rates near zero, a recession caused by a physical shortage of oil could rapidly transform a shrinking economy, otherwise known as a recession, into a financial collapse that takes down the banks and everything else. We could regret that today's low oil prices caused the search for replacement supplies to virtually disappear. That could be the thing that pops the global debt bubble that has been blowing for the last 35 years. That experience would be a lot more unpleasant than expensive gasoline or diesel fuel. All this talk of shutting down US shale producers is silly. Any shutdown forced on them by a world oil price at which US shale can't compete will only be temporary. Even if most of the current US frackers go broke, so what? The oil is still there and somebody owns it. When prices rise, as the Saudis pray, back will come the frackers. And what with Iraq coming back on stream, the oil world has changed, not that Saudi seems to have noticed. OPEC has never been anything other than a price fixing cartel and the sooner it collapses the better.

Monday, January 18, 2016

The E.U. Commission has already written to the Polish government asking how its new media law will work with EU rules on media freedom. Schulz described the government’s actions as a “dangerous Putinisation of European politics”, while Oettinger suggested Poland should be put under rule of law supervision, legislation designed to deal with “systemic threats” to EU values. Responding to the criticism, Poland’s government summoned Germany’s ambassador for talks and warned Brussels not to interfere in its affairs on the basis of “biased and politically engaged” reports. The defence minister Antoni Macierewicz went further, saying Poland would not be lectured by Germany “on democracy and freedom”, while his colleague, justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, wrote an open letter to Oettinger alluding to the Nazi occupation of Poland. “Such words, said by a German politician, cause the worst of connotations among Poles,” Ziobro wrote. “Also in me. I’m a grandson of a Polish officer, who during World War II fought in the underground National Army with ‘German supervision’.”

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Sterling plunged to a five-and-a-half year low against the US dollar on Tuesday, as the UK's manufacturing sector shrank unexpectedly. Manufacturing production dropped by 0.4pc in November according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, compared to a 0.7pc fall in the wider industrial sector. The fall in industrial output was worse than any of the 30 analysts polled by Reuters had anticipated. There figures were described by Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, as "unambiguously rubbish". No surprise at all....What do you expect with an overvalued currency, a global recession, rigged competition from the slave labor Chinese manufacturing system and a UK government hell bent on jobs at any price in the bloated service sector? There is no industrial strategy, vocational training is a mess and unlike Corporatist Germany, government leaves manufacturing industry to sink or swim on its own. We are headed for a full blown Sterling crisis and all those two million new jobs of phone sanitizers, Cab drivers, hairdressers and delivering online shopping will disappear overnight...Figures and statistics are always fiddled...in reality British people have been mislead by the politicians just as people are mislead in nearly all countries on the planet. When lying and morally corrupt politicians are the captains one never knows where the journey will take us. Britain's feel good factors are essentially due to nearly a decades printing of money and of course the false sense of security generated by a.......massively overheated property market...Britain is in effect a nation which doesn't produce very much any more, its a nation of supermarkets and banking and insurance. Dear Mr. Cameron please lets have a breakdown of how Britain earns its money .Britain has possibly lived above its means since before the second world war.......with a few rare intervals.in between. Billions have been frittered away and yet we do not have a few pounds more for the junior doctors who keep our decrepit NHS afloat. Something seriously wrong here. The markets always know the truth though and the pound is likely to get whacked even more. Wait till the euro recovers !!

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Honda confirmed Thursday that an inflator ruptured in a crash that killed a teenager in July, the ninth fatality linked to air bags made by Japan's Takata. When an inflator ruptures, it can hurl metal and plastic shrapnel at a car's driver or passengers, causing sometimes fatal injuries. "American Honda has confirmed that the Takata driver's front air bag inflator ruptured in the crash of a 2001 Honda Accord Coupe on July 22, 2015 near Pittsburgh," the automaker said in a statement. "Injuries related to this air bag inflator rupture likely resulted in the tragic death of the underage driver." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which inspected the wreck along with Honda officials, has attributed eight deaths in the U.S. to the air bags. All were in Hondas. In addition, another death occurred outside the U.S. The Takata recalls now involve at least 23 million ammonium-nitrate inflators in 19 million vehicles involving 11 automakers. "This young person's death is tragic, and it underscores why we are continuing to work so hard to get these defective inflators off the road," said NHTSA spokesman Gordon Trowbridge when the death was announced earlier this month.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

" Police in Germany are investigating an alarming series of sexual assaults on women trying to celebrate the New Year by large groups of single men “of Arab or North African appearance”.

Authorities in the city of Cologne are to hold a crisis meeting on Tuesday after police described a group of some 1,000 men who took over the area around the main station on New Year’s Eve.

Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them. Police have received 90 criminal complaints, around a quarter of them for sexual assault, including one case of rape. Police in Hamburg say there was a series of similar incidents in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light area. Witnesses described groups of five to 15 men of who “hunted” women in the streets." Merkel, the leader of the EU, has brought this upon her country, and Europe. She had enough warnings...but works to another agenda. Let her continue to sink into the quagmire. Bring on our opportunity, to get out of the EU madhouse, as soon as possible.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

I dont think Yellen made a mistake , she knows she had to raise rates because she knows that most American pension funds were modeled on an interest rate of about 6 to 8% which they have been unable to achieve for the last ten years. This would have forced pension funds to take more riskier positions. It is also compulsory for pension funds to have a % in government bonds. If these pension funds come under pressure and they have to liquidate, this could put government bonds under pressure. Most European Nations are bankrupt so if their bonds become under pressure we are looking at a very large problem GLOBALLY. There is 200 trillion in the bond market and for the large movers whom might be looking for a bid on 500 billion of bonds and not receive a bid would cause panic. Differentials in spreads between the USA and Europe because of negative interests rates will cause large capital inflows into the USA, this will cause equity and asset inflation in the USA which will necessitate even higher interest rates, which will cause the USA dollar to soar, That means all of those countries that borrowed in USA dollars at cheap interest rates will find it harder to make payments, USA rising, there currency in decline. Then you have to look at the west, socialism has only been born from WWII, we had the population explosion (the bubble) and now we are all coming up to retirement, which has not been funded because politicians thought that we would reproduce at the same rate but we didn't, I come from a family of seven and I have two children, which does not even replace the population. Western nations are in decline. Japan demographics are terrible and so is Germany. If you think Merkel is a nice lady letting in 800 thousand refugees from Syria.... think again. She needs these people to pay taxes to pay for her older generations pensions.

Friday, December 18, 2015

There is no jobs growth. The total hours worked in the US economy is the same as 15 years ago and most of the other economic indicators have been going south for months. The Fed is trapped and there is no way they can raise rates other than by a purely token amount without sending the whole thing rapidly to the dogs; in fact a recession next year is odds even if the Fed does nothing. We will get Big Bust 2 within the next 18 months...THERE WILL BE NO RATE RISE! Yellen knows full well you can't taper a Ponzi, so unless Goldman Sachs has massively shorted the markets and ordered its central banker minions to hike rates to crash the markets, Yellen will come up with yet another in her endless list of excuses to punt yet again on a rate hike. THERE WILL BE NO RATE RISE. Period. It's not like the Fed has any credibility left to lose. ..According to some soothsayers, there will be a 0.15% Fed rise BUT....after New Year there will be some more easing, say....$50 Billion. This time around the money printing will be in subsidies for the middle income earners. If the FED does not do this there will be turmoil and public protests. The Obama admin does not want this, not after the California shootings and most probably some more in the Christmas holiday season. The Obama gov needs the support of the public NOW more than ever....The Fed exists solely to further enrich the already super-rich. That means facilitating the looting and asset-stripping of the "middle income earners" (a soon to be extinct class) as part of the Fed's "No Billionaire Left Behind" monetary policy. The Fed will NEVER subsidize or otherwise give a damn about "middle income earners," much less savers, pensioners, and non-speculators, with whom it is in a state of undeclared financial warfare...The whole casino economy is built around perceptions. There are no relations between economic fundamentals and the value of the stock markets or the amount of public and private debt. A simple lack of confidence or misplaced rumor can cause a panic among investors. And then there's the trillions of debts owed in US dollars by entities who don't use the U.S. dollar as there native currency., Yellen will not raise rates in the absence of some exogenous event, i.e. a phone call from Goldman Sachs or the bond market going haywire as "investors" belatedly realize Yellen & her central banker cohorts are going to inflate away all government and TBTF banker debts and liabilities.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The ominous edifice on Avenue de Cortenbergh has been identified as a suitable venue for a closed-door meeting of European leaders ahead of the next EU summit, scheduled for the middle of December. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lövfen and his Greek counterpart Alexis Tsipras are going to be present, as are French President François Hollande, Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leaders of the Benalux countries and the Austrian chancellor. So that the rest of the EU member states don't feel left out, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will also take a seat at the negotiating table. Once again, the subject of the meeting will be the refugee crisis and the fragile alliance that Merkel is currently relying on to bring the ongoing flow of migrants from the Middle East under control. Together with Turkey and a number of countries in the heart of Europe, Merkel is hoping to seal a complicated deal she recently agreed to with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at the last EU summit. Essentially, it calls for Europe to provide billions in aid to Turkey in exchange for Ankara doing all it can to prevent Syrian refugees from traveling onward to Europe. Once those conditions have been fulfilled, however, the plan calls for the EU to accept a contingent of Syrian refugees, the size of which would likely be several hundred thousand. The scheme even has a provisional name: Merkel's Chief of Staff Peter Altmaier recently referred to it in an interview with SPIEGEL as the "Coalition of the Willing."